Tag Archive for 'ALM'

Crowdsourcing Comes to uberSVN

Published by jthornsby on January 19, 2012 in New Product, Subversion, uberSVN and WANdisco. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

You may remember we announced a new release of uberSVN at the end of 2011, bringing a major update to the integrated uberAPPS store that was designed to make adding new apps easier and quicker. Today, we are announcing the first of our new additions to the revamped app store: uTest’s range of testing types for web, desktop and mobile applications.

uTest covers all the major operating systems, and is backed by a community of over 45,000 on-demand professional testers from 180 countries. uTest enables development teams to launch higher quality products quicker, and to control the cost of testing. At WANdisco, we’re proud to announce this partnership with uTest, and will be offering uberSVN users two packages of uTest services:

Bronze

  • 5 professional testers located throughout the US and Canada
  • Testing across a selection of the most popular OS versions, browsers or devices relevant to your particular app
  • Real-time communication with your testing team

Silver

  • 10 professional testers located throughout the US and Canada
  • Testing across a selection of the most popular OS versions, browsers or devices relevant to your app
  • Real-time communication with your testing team
  • Online technical support from a uTest project manager

New to uberSVN? The free-to-download, easy-to-install open ALM platform can be downloaded from http://www.ubersvn.com/download. Existing uberSVN users can easily purchase uTest from within the integrated uberAPPS store. Ready to get started? Check out our step-by-step guide to adding uTest to uberSVN.

We’ll be making another exciting, uberAPPS announcement soon. Keep checking back for the latest news!

Using uberAPPS? Have your say on uberAPPS at the official forum!

That Was the Year that Was – uberSVN & All That…

Published by David Richards on December 20, 2011 in WANdisco and WANdisco. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

I suspect that I will always remember 2011 as the year when the curtain came down on one of the true greats – Steve Jobs. Great, not just in my world of Silicon Valley techies, but great for just about everyone else on the planet. Even though most of us never knew him we feel like we must have. We seem to use his stuff just about every day.

Apple’s success has had and will continue to have a massive impact on the design of computer systems and products. When we were thinking about uberSVN the very first thought we had was about the relationship between the product and the user. Ten years ago I don’t think that would have been the case. I guess you could call it ‘the pre-iPod days’ (the first iPod was released in October 2001 and was cast as “1,000 songs in your pocket”) before that, according to Jobs, music players were either “big and clunky or small and useless”.

Our customers told us that ‘old fashioned’ ALM was big-and-clunky; and they’re probably right! In many cases they were moving away from these ‘dinosaurs’ to a best-of-breed approach. Like Subversion for source control, JIRA, Redmine or Trac for defects & wiki, Review Board for peer code reviews, and so on.

When we launched uberSVN in April I talked about empowering users by giving them choice. Freedom to choose any combination of ALM tools that best fit the business requirements be it price or functionality, open source or closed source. How’s it doing? In short – amazingly well! To our delight it’s being used everywhere from Fortune 100 companies to the US Senate. I even got my 11 and 12 year-old children to install it on their MAC books – it took them only 5 minutes! Not sure how much use they get out of Subversion – but they did get double pocket money for their efforts! That really is the point of uberSVN. We have made an extremely powerful but complex product extremely easy to use and install by anyone and I think we succeeded in that regard.

We quickly followed-up with uberApps. Another ‘first of a kind’ product with an enterprise AppStore for software development tools. Now, with just a single click, it is possible to install a build & test product like Jenkins or even buy external QA resources from crowd-sourcing vendor uTest. This is another step in making ALM both usable and useful. Anyone, and I mean anyone can deploy these apps without special knowledge, experience or skills.

These products were developed in my hometown, Sheffield. It was our Christmas party there the other week and it really was astonishing to see how quickly we have grown. From a small office where we would “see what happens” we have grown to almost 40. There was a lot of laughing behind hands from my ‘friends’ from the south and lot’s of “ooop north” jibes. Well, in between wearing flat caps and racing whippets, the Sheffield team delivered an award-winning piece of software. uberSVN won 2 awards in the first year of its launch and we have seen almost 50,000 downloads.

Apache Subversion also continues to grow. Subversion is still the ‘King’ of source code management. More traditional Enterprises are turning away from old-fashioned / big-and-clunky ALM for Subversion. And SVN 1.7 (also released this year) has delivered a much-needed performance boost. Throughout the year I have been embroiled in various spats with the Giterons (Git fundamentalists who believe in the inerrancy of Linus) but only this month I have spoken to 3 or 4 companies that tried Git but had to pull it out due to various-and-sundry issues. Much more on that early in the new year, when we might just have a solution for those looking to use Git as more of a client to a central SVN server of record…

There was also some politics earlier in the year when one of our competitors used some pretty underhanded tactics to besmirch our good name. Unfortunately for them it worked quite well in our favor. We are, and always have been a big supporter of the ASF (we are even the only Subversion contributor to also be a sponsor). In fact, at the time of writing, we are in the process of proposing a new project for the ASF incubator. Again, lot’s more on that in the new year.

We also took some steps earlier in the year to solidify the Subversion community by acquiring SVNforum.org. I think we have done a pretty good job of updating the site software, Subversion Liveeradicating spam and generally making the site a useful, free resource for every SVN user. As part of our efforts for the SVN community we also hosted the first Subversion user conferences. Audiences in San Francisco, Boston and London attended “Subversion Live”. We are hosting Subversion Live again later in the year with a extended program.

So 2011 was a great year here at WANdisco but 2012 should be even better. We have several major product launches planned including a new (free) open source defect tracker / wiki, uberSVN Team, uberSVN Enterprise and a solution to the Git/SVN conundrum. In the words of ‘Potato Claus’ (the lead character in my kids’ favorite book from a few years ago) may I take this opportunity to wish everyone Happy Christmas, Kwanzaa, Chanukah, Winter Solstice, and also local and regional winter holidays and celebrations.

Here’s a rather nice pictorial representation of 2011 from a WANdisco perspective (click to enlarge):

uberSVN ‘Blake’ Released with Streamlined Subversion App Store

Published by jthornsby on December 15, 2011 in Subversion, uberSVN and WANdisco. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , .

The holiday season may be nearly upon us, but things are far from quiet at WANdisco! We’ve been busy working on our uberSVN open ALM platform for Apache Subversion, and are pleased to announce that uberSVN 11.12 (Blake) is now available! This release marks a major update for uberAPPS; uberSVN’s integrated app store for extending Subversion. With uberSVN 11.12, we have made it even easier to add apps to the uberAPPS store, and have added the option of making installed apps visible or invisible, on a per-user basis. Other key enhancements include:

  • A more helpful screen when uberSVN is unable to connect to the uberAPPS store.
  • Repository support for anonymous reading. When enabled, the repository can be accessed/read without the need to authenticate.
  • The option to switch to and from the latest version of Subversion – version 1.7.2 – with the innovative SVNswitch tool.

As you may already know, uberSVN is developed entirely in Sheffield, UK (it was even awarded the prestigious Made in Sheffield mark earlier this year!) so what better way to codename our releases, than after local Sheffield pubs? uberSVN 11.12 is codenamed ‘Blake’ after the Blake Hotel pub in Walkley, Sheffield, and after successfully releasing uberSVN 11.12, we thought there was no better way to celebrate the release of Blake, than having a few pints in the Blake!

uberSVN is free to download and easy to install, and gives users the freedom to build their own, customized ALM platform from the open and closed components they want to work with. It also comes with social coding capabilities, to make collaboration easier – particularly across distributed teams! Simply visit http://www.ubersvn.com/download to download the brand-new version 11.12; or check out our Top 10 Reasons to Try uberSVN, for more info on what uberSVN has to offer!

More information on uberSVN 11.12 is available at the Release Notes.

Getting Started with Jenkins in uberSVN

Published by jthornsby on October 25, 2011 in Subversion, uberSVN and WANdisco. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , , , , .

WANdisco are experts on which tools add the most value for Subversion users. With the free-to-download uberSVN and uberAPPS, we have taken the hassle out of ALM by selecting the best free and paid application lifecycle management products for Apache Subversion, and offering them on a ‘one-click to purchase, one more click to install’ basis. Our uberAPPS store includes Jenkins, the number one open source continuous integration server. The Jenkins CI system allows users to manage and control the application development lifecycle, including build, documentation, testing and packaging. In uberSVN, Jenkins can add value by watching for code changes in repositories, automatically performing builds, initiating tests, notifying users, rolling changes back and forth, scheduling, monitoring and managing external, time-based cron jobs, and performing operations on remote machines.

In this post, we’ll walk you through downloading Jenkins and creating your first job, before looking at some more advanced project options, designed to give you maximum control over your Jenkins installation.

Installing Jenkins

uberSVN makes the download process as simple as possible, by offering Jenkins through its integrated ‘uberAPPS’ store. (Please note that system admin permission is required to download, install and activate Jenkins). To add Jenkins to uberSVN, simply follow these five steps:

1) Select the ‘uberAPPS’ tab from the uberSVN dashboard. This takes you to the store front, where all the available apps and services are displayed.
2) Select Jenkins. This takes you to Jenkins’ product screen, where you can browse the product description and links to relevant websites.
3) Click ‘Download Now’ and uberSVN’s updates will download Jenkins from the WANdisco servers:

4) Once installed, Jenkins is ready to deploy: just click ‘Activate!’
5) A new ‘Jenkins’ tab will appear, which leads directly to uberSVN’s integrated ‘Jenkins’ screen.

Admins can decide to either make Jenkins available to all uberSVN users (in which case the Jenkins tab will be visible to everyone who logs into the uberSVN portal) or define exactly who can access Jenkins. To limit who can access Jenkins, specify users in the Application Visibility field:

Creating Your First Job

Once you have successfully installed Jenkins, a Jenkins sub-tab will be added to the repository screen. To create your first job, simply:

1) Select the Jenkins sub-tab.
2) Click ADD to add a new job:

3) When prompted, enter a Name and Description and indicate whether you are wanting to Copy Existing Job.
4) The screen will display the Jenkins project form, pre-configured to use the selected repository. This is where you may encounter a quirk with Jenkins that causes the following error to be displayed when you set up your first job:

Unable to access http://repository url:svn: Options/repo name failed (show details)
(Maybe you need to enter credential?)

5) To get around this problem, click on the ‘enter credential’ link and enter the username and password for an account that is valid for the repository, and has read permissions.

6) If the account is valid, you will see the following confirmation message:

Authentication was successful. Information is stored in Hudson (sic) now.

7) Run through the available options for how you want the job to be set up – and hit save!

Creating Jenkins through uberSVN in this way, allows the user to easily track the jobs via the Jenkins tab in the uberSVN portal.

Advanced Options

As you can see, uberSVN is designed to make it as easy as possible to get up-and-running with Jenkins, even if you’re a first time user. But, for those with more experience, uberSVN includes plenty of advanced project options, for users who want maximum control over their Jenkins installation:

Quiet period – defines the amount of time a newly-scheduled build waits before actually being built. This is useful for collapsing multiple CVS change notification emails into one, and when a Jenkins installation is too busy with too many builds.

Retry count – specifies the amount of times Jenkins will retry when a build fails to checkout from a repository.

Block build when upstream project is building – prevents the project from building when a dependency of the specified project is in the queue, or building.

Block build when downstream project is building – prevents the project from building when a child of the specified project is in the queue, or building.

Use custom workspace – specifies the workspace location manually. This is useful in a few situations, for example when paths are hard-coded and when the code needs to be built on a particular location.

Build after other projects are built – schedules a new build for a project, when a particular project has finished building. This is useful for running an extensive test after a build is complete.

Publish JUnit test result report – Jenkins understands the JUnit test report XML format, and this option allows it to provide useful information about test results, including historical test result trends, and a web UI for viewing test reports.

Build other projects – triggers builds of specified projects once another build has been successfully completed.

Archive build artifacts – for example, distribution zip files or jar files, so they can be downloaded later.

Aggregate downstream test results – a convenient way of collecting all the test results from downstream test jobs and displaying it alongside the relevant build. This allows users to quickly see the overall test status of the given build.

Record fingerprints of files to track usage – keeps track of where/when certain files are produced and used. To use this feature, all of the involved projects (including the projects in which the file is used) must be set to record fingerprints.

Email notification – Jenkins will send out an email to the specified recipients when a certain improvement event occurs.

That gets you started with Jenkins, be sure to check back later for more help and advice on getting the most out of Jenkins and other uberAPPS.

uberSVN can be downloaded for free from http://www.ubersvn.com/

Top 10 Reasons to Try uberSVN

Published by jthornsby on October 17, 2011 in uberSVN and WANdisco. 4 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Launched in April, WANdisco’s uberSVN platform is a major new product designed to transform the world’s most popular source code management system into an open, extensible platform for ALM, empowering Subversion users by giving them the widest choice of toolsets with no vendor lock-in. With uberSVN, WANdisco set out to give developers exactly what they want: an easy-to-install, easy-to-use open ALM platform for Subversion, that they can extend however and whenever they choose, crafting their own complete, best-of-breed ALM solution. In this post, we’ll run through the Top 10 reasons to give uberSVN a go today:

1) Easy to administer:

The uberSVN dashboard is divided into four main areas, giving you an insight into the overall status of your Subversion implementation’s servers, repositories, and all the users’ latest activities.

  • Tabs – These allow you to drill down into the individual repositories, users, and teams.
  • Activity Stream – This is where all messages and changes to the repositories are displayed. Actions displayed include: when a user commits to a repository, or makes administrative changes to a user or a team. Social actions, such as team members’ comments on postings and activities, are also displayed.
  • List of repositories – This is where you can view all the repositories that have been added to uberSVN.
  • Quick Links – This is where you can define quick links to both specific areas within the repositories, and to outside applications that are part of your development lifecycle.

2) Easy to collaborate:

uberSVN works on the concept of ‘teams;’ allowing groups of people to be assigned certain access privileges. Working in teams in uberSVN has the following benefits:

  • Easy to add new members. Once you’ve defined what a team can do inside specific repositories, you never really have to define user access again. When adding a new user to an existing team, they will automatically be assigned the relevant access privileges.

  • Easy to change access controls. A large organisation might have dozens of teams, each with different access controls to different repositories. Traditionally, changing access control for one team, would require each team member’s privileges to be altered individually – an administrative nightmare! With uberSVN, not only are access privileges easier to setup, they are easier to control, as you can assign and remove entire teams from a repository.

3) Easy to Manage Multiple Repositories:

In today’s organizations, it’s common for development teams to be working on multiple projects, across multiple repositories, and uberSVN’s filtering system helps you keep on top of this. With uberSVN, you are always looking at a defined set of information; for example, information about all the users, all the teams, etc, that relate to a repository. If you then select a particular repository, you can view all the commit messages, comments, users, etc, that relate to that repository. By helping you manage and organize information across multiple repositories, uberSVN keeps you from getting overwhelmed. Of course, all of this information (save for the comments made within uberSVN’s social coding environment) could be gathered from the log information in a repository but, crucially when dealing with multiple repositories, uberSVN lets you drill down to the information that is most relevant to you.

4) Freedom to Choose:

Previously, Subversion users have had two options when extending Subversion into the ALM sphere. The first, is to go with a closed source ALM solution that leverages Subversion for version control, but imposes a vendor lock-in. The users have no freedom to tweak the implementation to suit their own needs, and when their requirements evolve beyond the vendor’s specific solution, it has to be replaced entirely. A hand-crafted solution assembled from a variety of components, does give the users the freedom to tailor a solution to suit their particular needs, but this freedom comes at a cost:

  • a lack of integration. There is no guarantee that the product will work throughout the development lifecycle, or will interconnect with all the other elements of the software system.

  • a lack of documentation.
  • no professional support option.
  • they rely on brittle, home-grown scripts that require no specialist knowledge to maintain.

uberSVN aims to give the developer all the freedom of a homegrown solution, but with the support and integration you’d expect from a closed source ALM solution. With uberSVN, developers can:

  • replace specific components as requirements evolve, or as better tools become available.
  • choose from both open and closed components.
  • stick with their own open or closed source defect trackers, build servers, etc, even if an alternative is available in the Apps store.

5) Social Coding Capabilities:

uberSVN combines Twitter and Facebook-like capabilities, to provide a social coding environment out-of-the-box and bring social networking functionality into your development environment. In uberSVN, each development team has its own home page with profiles of the team members and information such as the projects they’re working on and the repositories they’re using. This functionality is particularly useful in modern IT organisations, where development teams tend to be working on multiple projects, on multiple repositories. Not only does this enable team members to keep track of one another’s real-time progress across all repositories, but managers can leverage uberSVN’s social coding capabilities to keep track of the status of projects. There is also a chat facility for instant communication.

6) Integrated App Store:

We know that there’s no shortage of tools out there, but we also know that you don’t always have the time to define the applications that will add the most value to your Subversion experience. Therefore, uberSVN comes integrated with uberApps; a one-stop shop for software development lifecycle applications for the enterprise. We have tested the integration and installation of every tool in the app store for you, so every application comes pre-certified to integrate with the uberSVN platform, without the hassle of testing it yourself.

With one-click to purchase and one more click to install, simply select the tool you want from uberApps, select the install button, and you’ll be guided through installation. This is a streamlined version of the traditional installation process; for example, if you wanted to install Jenkins, usually you would visit the Jenkins CI site, install it on your machine and run a Java jar on the war file. Now, Jenkins is available straight from the uberApps store. And, if you need some extra help, WANdisco provide professional support services, and are your single port of call for assistance with either uberSVN, or any of the applications downloaded from uberApps.

7) Easy to Install:

With a GUI-based installation and no prior Subversion experience assumed, uberSVN is designed to be easy to install. On the installation screen, simply specify your installation settings, including your:

  • installation directory.
  • the directory located in your first Subversion repository (more can be added at a later date through the “create repository” option in the admin console.)
  • uberSVN License Key

And that’s it! Although uberSVN is designed to be easy to install, Subversion experts can easily change the model configuration to suit their own particular needs.

8 ) Support:

Homegrown solutions may give you the freedom to choose the open and closed source components that work the best for you, but they lack the professional support you’d get with a closed source ALM solution. With uberSVN, we combine the freedom of a homegrown solution with a professional support option. uberSVN support includes:

  • 24-by-7 online, phone and email support.
  • guaranteed response times.
  • automated delivery of fixes and upgrades.
  • global coverage from the US and Europe.

9) Toggle Between Latest Releases

Subversion 1.7 introduces some great new features, but we know that upgrading core technologies can be a scary business! To make the leap to Subversion 1.7 easier, uberSVN 11.10 includes an innovative new svnSWITCH tool that gives the administrator the freedom to upgrade to 1.7 with just a click and a server restart – even better, the switch is just as easily reversible. This gives users the option of upgrading to 1.7 to take advantage of the new features, but with the safety-net of downgrading to 1.6 if required.

10) …..and it’s free!

A free download of uberSVN is available now, for the Windows, Linux and OSX platforms.

The Next Frontier of Software Development: Social Coding for Subversion

Published by Jim Campigli on April 30, 2011 in General, New Product, Subversion, SVN Hackers, uberSVN and WANdisco. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

WANdisco recently unveiled uberSVN - a major new product available free of charge that transforms Subversion into an open, extensible platform for application lifecycle management (ALM). In addition to plug-and-play flexibility and rich system and user administration capabilities, uberSVN provides the first-ever social coding environment for Subversion, taking enterprise software development beyond the limits of email, wikis, defect trackers, peer-code-review-tools and other applications typically used to manage projects.

uberSVN’s social coding environment reflects the convergence of social networking paradigms represented by Facebook and Twitter that foster instant communication and the collaborative development models of open source communities where software with features similar to these social networking sites was first used. And it’s having the same positive impact on software quality and developer productivity behind corporate firewalls that it’s had in the open source communities that deliver such market-dominating software as the Apache web server, Linux operating system and even Subversion itself.

uberSVN is organized around development teams and their activities. Each team has a home page that profiles the team members, lists the projects they’re working on, repositories they’re using and their latest activity and status. Team members can see each other’s real-time progress by simply subscribing to Twitter-like feeds that managers can also monitor.

With uberSVN, just like developers in an open source community, software engineers in corporate IT environments can rapidly exchange information and continually learn from one another. Peer review and continuous feedback are the norm. The overall skill level of the development team goes up and the all-too-common pitfall of reinventing the wheel is avoided. The end result is higher quality software delivered in far less time.

uberSVN is free.  Download it now at http://www.ubersvn.com/download.